I'm excited to announce MYSTERIUM: Maryland/Yale Spring Tournament Edited for Regular difficulty In University Material, the successor to last year's STIMPY, 2014's SUBMIT, and the Terrapin Invitationals of years past. The set will be written by members of the Yale and Maryland teams, and will be played in the late spring (March-April—the same timeframe as STIMPY last year). I (Jacob Reed) will head-edit the set, with oversight/help from Jordan Brownstein.

The target difficulty for the tournament is (to use Jordan's phrase) "classical" regular difficulty. This attitude hews closer to how good (challenging) high school sets are written than college sets: we'll try to make a large number of the questions strongly "curricular," and keep difficulty decidedly below last year's version of regular difficulty.

Cheynem wrote:Why are econ and psych mandated 1/1, as opposed to the other social sciences? Are you operating on the idea that they are the most accessible of the social sciences?

If you define "accessible" in a certain way, yes—I think that more economics and psychology results (and more of the people who conducted the studies etc.) make it into newspapers, blogs etc., for instance. And I think that people are more likely to have taken classes in those two than in the other social sciences. But it's definitely not a normative claim about how much econ and psych are intellectually "worth."

Can you expand a bit on the "GR myth will be partially covered by classical lit"? Are you just counting tossups on things like _Antigone_ and _The Odyssey_ as GR myth, or can we expect tossups on like, _Dionysus_ (using only clues from the Metamorphoses)? In either case, the focus on GR myth only seems a little arbitrary, unless we can expect the actual myth distribution to have far more non-GR myth.

Lo, a momentary rabbit-stage wrote:Can you expand a bit on the "GR myth will be partially covered by classical lit"? Are you just counting tossups on things like _Antigone_ and _The Odyssey_ as GR myth, or can we expect tossups on like, _Dionysus_ (using only clues from the Metamorphoses)? In either case, the focus on GR myth only seems a little arbitrary, unless we can expect the actual myth distribution to have far more non-GR myth.

Thanks!

I was thinking of questions more like your Dionysus/Ovid example; but you're right that a "literary" question about the Eddas, etc. could absorb some of the reduction of myth as well.

Periplus of the Erythraean Sea wrote:Not to be intrusive, but is there a reason the Northwestern mirror hasn't posted a forum announcement, even though their tournament is only days away?

We don't have the resources to run anything more than a tournament for the small amount of teams (us, Illinois, WUSTL, Michigan, and Chicago A/B) who contacted me about running a highly competitive Nats warmup site, so we felt like we didn't need to announce on the forums since we already had a full house. Chicago should, within the next week, be announcing another mirror for the rest of the teams in the region that will be happening sometime after Nationals.